Robin’s Nest
At home with CNN’s Robin Meade
By Allison Weiss Entrekin

It’s that laugh.

It’s a passionate, heartfelt belly laugh. That incredibly genuine laugh goes perfectly with Robin Meade, 37, a drop-dead-gorgeous former Miss Ohio and one of television’s most popular morning news anchors.

Meade and her husband of 13 years, Tim, just moved into her Dunwoody home and several rooms still have unopened boxes. But as she walks from one place to another describing her plans for window treatments and furniture, you start to realize she actually enjoys being in transition. “I feel like this is a new phase for us,” Meade says of her move from their Brookhaven mansion to a smaller, ranch-style home outside the perimeter. “This house is going to be decidedly more casual, because I’m past the stage of being showy and having fancy things.”

Don’t get her wrong–her new 3,500-square-foot house is far from a shack. But the real showpiece of Meade’s new domicile isn’t the home, but the fantastic 4.5 acres of magnificent land upon which it sits. Filled with mature trees and a 2-acre lake teeming with ducks and geese, it’s a piece of property that makes you forget you’re anywhere near the city. “There’s so much privacy; you feel like you’re a million miles away,” Meade says. And while she may not be quite that far from honking horns and traffic jams, she is a good quarter-mile walk from her mailbox, a fact she cherishes. “It’s a nice walk for the dog, and plus, there are times when you really want to go out and get the mail and not have to talk to anybody,” she says. “I kind of feel like after talking for four hours straight in the morning, I’m talked out by the end of the day. I want to go to a place that’s like my Shangri-La.”

What really led Meade to this house on a lake in the capital of the South was her pursuit of a career that led her to become a national celebrity. Back in 1991, Meade was a college senior at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio, where she studied radio/television programming and performance. This daughter of a minister always dreamed of working in front of a camera. That same year, she met Tim, a man who would one day become her husband. But before she could throw herself into an entry-level broadcasting career, she was named 1992’s Miss Ohio. She spent the next year touring the state and fulfilling her pageant duties. Her broadcasting career began in earnest with her first assignment as a reporter in the quiet Ohio town of Mansfield. It wasn’t long before Meade’s confidence and poise drew the attention of larger markets, and over the next eight years, she found herself anchoring newscasts in Cleveland abd Columbus, Ohio, Miami and finally, Chicago. That’s when CNN came calling, and Meade got the break of a lifetime. “They wanted me to be a morning anchor,” she says, instantly smiling from the memory.

It wasn’t an easy move. “There was some adjustment coming from a big midwestern city to the South,” Meade admits, but the transition was made smoother by the fact that Tim was able to manage his wireless company from a facility north of Alpharetta. Meade became an instant hit, quickly becoming the network’s unofficial ratings hero. In 2005, CNN execs decided to capitalize on her popularity and create a morning show around their rising star. And thus, Robin & Company was born.

“It’s so much fun,” Meade says of the job that has made her a household name. “Obviously, first and foremost, people tune into our show for information. But I feel like we have a little license to laugh out loud if we want to, without being frivolous or off-topic. It’s a nice liberty that I don’t think every news program has.”

Still, despite the hype, Meade seems determined to keep her feet planted on the ground. Back at her one-story home, she is her own interior designer, glazing and antiquing her bedroom walls, developing color schemes and even sewing her own drapes. “I just whipped these up yesterday,” she says, pointing to the colorful swaths of fabric hanging above her bathroom window. “I don’t know how to make clothes, but my mom taught me how to make a few window dressings.” Why would a woman who can easily afford to have someone else deal with the drapes choose to sew them herself? “I think I enjoy it because so much of my job is about information and being concise and precise, so this lets me express a creative side of my personality,” she says.

There’s more evidence of this creative side in the den, where the walls will soon be adorned with Meade’s collection of stringed instruments. She also has a piano–a gift from her husband–she likes to play. And did we mention she sings? She does, even going so far as to belt out an operatic rendition of “Wild Thing” during a recent newscast.

Perhaps the one thing Meade doesn’t do is cook, and she admits as much when she walks through her kitchen and announces, “This is where the pizza is delivered!” With opposite schedules–she’s in bed by 6 p.m. and up at 2 a.m., while Tim doesn’t get home from work until 8 at night–it’s easy to understand why she hasn’t been motivated to learn. “We really don’t see each other until the weekends, so it would be silly for either of us to cook, because there’s no one to eat it,” she says.

Instead, Meade spends her afternoons walking her dog, Rocco (named by her viewers, who consider it an abbreviated version of Robin & Company), decorating and “trying to stay awake.” It’s an upside-down routine, but one Meade swears she doesn’t mind. “It was hard to get used to my schedule earlier in my career, but somehow along the way I’ve gotten used to it, and now I can’t imagine doing anything but morning news,” Meade says. “I don’t think my personality would work in any other time slot.”

Indeed, Meade’s coworkers call her the ultimate morning person, marveling at her ability to wear a smile at 3 a.m. “It’s no mystery why she was crowned Miss Ohio back in the day,” says Adrianna Costa, entertainment correspondent for Robin & Company. “Robin is practically perfect in every way.”

But that’s not to say the former beauty queen can’t cut loose. Meade has a witty sense of humor, a fact corroborated by her coworkers. “She acts just like one of the guys,” says Bob Van Dillen, Robin & Company’s meteorologist.

To Meade, having that kind of rapport with her team is what makes her job fun. “I work with a really great group of people,” she says. “They’re very professional, but they also know how to cut up when we want to cut up.”
Great job, great family, great house–is Robin Meade finally settling down? “I told my husband the other day, ‘I think we should always live in this house,’” she says. “I hope that my job keeps me right here in Atlanta. I always say that as long as I’m not bored and as long as I still feel fulfilled every day, then I am where I’m supposed to be.” She pauses and smiles. “Plus, I’m having a lot of fun.” Then she lets out a laugh that seemed to light up the room.

"My mother collects glassware, especially Fenton. She is the garage-sale queen. She has a lot of nice glassware but not enough space to display it, so she gives me one piece a year. Aren’t these gorgeous?"

"I bought these guitars in silent auctions that support local charities. The electric guitar is from Bruce Springsteen; who doesn’t love him? The other is from Keith Urban, my guilty pleasure."

"A number of people in my dad’s family mined coal in Kentucky, including my grandfather. I keep this miner’s lamp on my bathroom counter because it’s a nice reminder of how lucky my husband and I are that we have jobs we love, especially when there are so many people who have the jobs they do because they have to put food on the table."